Facebook Announce Augmented Reality Platform

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Facebook Announce Augmented Reality Platform

Facebook announced some of their big plans for the future at their annual Facebook F8 conference yesterday.

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the conference with keynote address focusing on their new mission, community.  

Mark Zuckerberg along with some other Facebook executives then went on to make a bunch of announcements revealing the new tools and platforms coming to Facebook for developers.

Here’s everything you need to know about Facebook’s F8 conference:

Augmented Reality Studio

Augmented reality is where digital images are placed over the real world. Facebook is opening up its augmented reality platform so that developers can make use of Facebook’s expensive tools for things like image recognition.

Augmented Reality Studio introduces Camera Effects for artists, designers and developers to build graphics for Facebook Camera.

Frame Studio is also a new tool that enables developers to build masks, animations, etc.

Messenger

David Marcus, Head of Facebook Messenger, says “People prefer to use Messenger to interact with companies”. He also expressed the desire to turn Messenger into the “yellow pages of messaging”.

Facebook Messenger currently has over 100,000 bots on it, and Messenger bots will be getting a massive overhaul in the new Messenger Platform 2.0. These new updates include Spotify and Apple Music integrations, as well as introducing game play and a Game tab within the app.

So in the future you can expect to do things like order takeaways, book cinema tickets and taxis without leaving the Messenger app.

Facebook Spaces 

Facebook also announced that social VR will come to Facebook Spaces, which is the virtually reality app that lets an avatar of you hang out with friends inside your headset. Users can also call friends who don’t have VR headsets via Messenger and interact with them via floating 2D screens.

The app launches today as a beta.

Workplace

Workplace is a competitor of Slack, which is a collaboration tool to help with productivity.

Currently, the full version of Workplace is free, however later this year this will change. Facebook announced that there will still be a free basic version of Workplace but there will also be a paid for premium version that will offer better admin tool and cloud storage. They will also be adding file sharing, legal compliance and video to the existing set of tools.  

Luke Stanley